Easter Egg

Easter Eggs are surprise features or bonus content included in the game as a treat for the fans.[1]

These can be major features, such as Diablo 2's Secret Cow Level, but more commonly they are smaller inside jokes. For instance, Diablo 2 featured the names of the game designers and prominent members of the fansite community as items, monsters, mercenaries and other things.

The Diablo 3 team did not reveal any of the Easter Eggs they had planned for Diablo 3 in advance (of course not, or they wouldn't be surprises!) but the developers have spoken in general terms about wanting to include such surprises and bonuses.

We don’t really know at this point. I really like the idea of secret stuff that Diablo II put forward, but it’s not the kind of thing we would decide this early. But if we have something, I can assure people will be happy with it.

I will say the thing I liked about the cow level was that it wasn’t just fluff; there was stuff that you could do there that actually had purpose within the game. The thing I didn’t like about it was that it almost replaced part of the game. And so, if we looked to add something like that, we’d be a little smarter about it. We would want it to have a function within the game, but we wouldn’t want it to replace any core content, which is something that I think the cow level really did.

Diablo II had a lot of little oddities to it that made the experience not as usable. I certainly wouldn’t want things like, ‘Don’t kill the cow king because we’ve got to keep the level open!’ We would avoid scenarios like that. The secret of a cow level is a cool secret. The secret that you’re not supposed to kill the king because you’ll ruin the cow level forever — that’s a bad secret. So we would try to get rid of some of the bad ones.

Slashdot: The Diablo franchise is especially iconic for things like easter eggs and secrets. Can we expect the same of depth in Diablo III? Any hints?

Leonard Boyarsky: No, no hints. They wouldn't be easter eggs then. We'll probably drop some hints here and there, maybe post some easter eggs on the web for people to dig out. Maybe some red herrings to send people in the wrong direction, but most of that stuff just comes naturally during development. As you develop areas, these things come up, and we're always throwing around ideas. So yeah, we talk about that all the time, and we are planning on doing quite a bit of that stuff.

They even included some in the Blizzcon demo build itself, in 2009. [4]

Leonard Boyarsky: Yeah, there's something hidden in there. It's just fun stuff. It's nothing that the people are going to be like, "Oh my God, I found this thing. I found the fifth class!" Nothing like that. It's just fun little jokes here and there.

A Tyrael mini-pet was added with a special conversion code given out to attendees to Blizzard's WWI 2008, in Paris. This code enabled the Tyrael mini-pet, who hovers along after the player, and can /dance, when required.

This was one of the rarest and most sought-after of all mini-pets at the time, with codes selling for upwards of $800 on eBay.

The Diablo III Collector's Edition contained a World of Warcraft bonus pet; a Fetish Shaman of the type seen in Diablo II and Diablo III (via the Witch Doctor's Hex spell.

The model was first datamined from a WoW patch[7] in September 2011, with speculation at the time that this was the D3CE pet. Those suspicions were confirmed a month later, when Blizzard revealed the contents[8] of the D3CE in October 2011.

The pet was enabled in a WoW patch[9] in early December 2010. Fans observed that was pointless, since without the D3CE, and the redemption code fans can obtain from within it, there is no way to enable the Fetish Shaman pet. Nevertheless, Blizzard had the pet ready for late 2011, as that was Diablo 3's initially-planned release date, and even after the game was delayed the WoW patch guys saw no reason to hold back the pet even though no one would be able to enable it for months yet.

Oddly, the Fetish Shaman is not riding piggyback, as these demons always have in the game.

Tyrael's Charger[10] a World of Warcraft epic mount, a flying horse wearing Tyrael-styled armor, was first discovered through data-mining[11] on October 28, 2011. The full details were revealed soon afterwards,[12] and the mount was available as a perk with the purchase of the twelve-month World of Warcraft Annual Pass. Subscribers to that plan also received a free copy of Diablo III upon release, and along with other perks.

A smaller Starcraft 2 Easter Egg features Deckard Cain's classic "Stay awhile, and listen." line of dialogue as the name of an Achievement. A fan reported on where this achievement was obtained. [13]

This achievement is after you finish the Gates of Hell mission in planet Char. There’s a cinematic right after, then you see an interactive Raynor, General Waterfield and Tychus with a char background. The achievement suddenly pops when that loads. It’s interactive as in you hover the mouse over Raynor, the General and Tychus, and they become silhouette-highlighted, you click them and they have a cutscene-dialogue.

The first and most dramatic is an appearance of a miniature Diablo in a SC2 single-player mission called "The Devil's Playground." Diablo is just a "critter," one of the forms of ambient life, but it's definitely Big Red, though he's small and gloriously burning, the model looks to be the same one used for the World of Warcraft mini-pet.

A screenshot can be seen to the right. See the original news post for more details and a movie of the little guy.

Map information: City Billboards [72.58.113.02] in the map editor. It is named THorner04.SC2Map. It's where Tychus Findlay mounts the Thor and wrecks havoc in Korhal city to broadcast off-world the tape where Mengsk says he wont let anyone stand on his way, and he will rather see the sector burned to ashes.

In one of the Single Player missions: Ghost of a Chance, on the planet Avernus, a laptop is found on a desktop in one building. The World of Warcraft character selection screen is displayed on a different screen, while the main screen shows a message: Want to play a game?" Various options are listed, including Diablo III:[4]

Bridge

Checkers

Chess

Fighter Combat

Desert Warfare

Diablo III

Theaterwide Tactical Warfare

Global Thermonuclear War

This is a larger Easter Egg referring to the 1983 Matthew Broderick movie WarGames, in which a computer hacker starts playing games with the central computer at NORAD, inadvertently nearly starting World War III. The computer in that film's usual prompt is, "Would you like to play a game?" With Global Thermonuclear War as the last of several options.

The Diablo games are milestones in video game history, and have been referenced in numerous other titles, both RPGs and other types of games. This section lists Easter Eggs in other games that refer to elements of Blizzard's Diablo games.

Flagship Studios was formed in 2003 by Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer, David Brevik, and Bill Roper along with numerous other former Blizzard North employees. Their first (and last) title was Hellgate:London, an ARPG set in a demon-infested, post-apocalyptic future. The title was directly influenced by Diablo in numerous ways, but only included a few direct homages.

The most obvious was Wart, an annoying, one-legged NPC boy who was the object of some early game quests. He was an homage to the infamous one-legged Wirt, of Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 fame.

RPG Sacred has a map area modeled after the town of Tristram, as seen in Diablo I. A quote from an informative Sacred fansite, which was the source of the images below: [15]

Some of you might not know but Tristram is a famous little village connected with the game Diablo. In Diablo 1 this is the place where your hero starts out. In Diablo 2 it has been destroyed and is where you collect Deckard Cain from. There is a little village in Sacred which is tremendously similar to the Tristram in the original Diablo. It is located north of Moorbrook and shouldnt be very hard to find. Cloest portals to this place are the Mystdale Castle portal and Valley of Zhurag-Nar portal.

Also note when you enter the village the residents all turn into zombies and will start attacking you. This is also the town where Glubba wants to be taken (end of Act 3). And I'm pretty sure this is also the village which is referenced by a rune stone somewhere around Mascarell.

Two images showing off the Sacred version of Tristram can be seen below. Click them for larger views.